ketchup (ketchupblood) wrote in ironman7, @ 2007-09-11 23:46:00 |
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Entry tags: | ketchupblood, prince of tennis, week 4: prompt 4 |
Prince of Tennis (Sanada/Yukimura) [week 4 - prompt 4]
Title: The Passage of Time
Author: ketchupblood
Rating: PG
Warnings: Slash, horrendously underdeveloped characters and no development of plot at all
Word Count: ~4,300
Summary: Harpie!Yukimura and Prince!Sanada meet, grow close, and eventually sleep together (in the most innocent way, of course)
Author's Notes: Damn, this turned out badly. I was so excited for it, too...
4. though the rain weighs down your wings, still the caged bird's got to sing
It was a sad little corner, tucked between the washrooms and the animals of the untamed south. Even the zookeepers occasionally forgot that the little cage was there and it wasn't unusual for him to go without food for weeks. The cage's occupant didn't move when he was forgotten; he rarely moved when he was remembered. The children of those wealthy enough to visit the collection of exotic creatures often walked right past him, so fixed a structure he had become in the zoo, like the little benches that dotted the grounds but not nearly as functional.
He no longer understood what the people walking past him were saying. He had understood once and he supposed that he could again, if he would listen to them speak for long enough, but there was no need. In a few thousand years, their language would change again and he would have to relearn it. Humans were too fickle, too changing, too fast. They no longer paid him any mind and he treated them likewise; if not for the barriers placed on the cage so long ago by their ancestors, he would have long been gone but the bars never rusted, no matter how neglected they were, and they were as strong now as they had been the day he had been shoved in, torn and bleeding.
He had healed now and he was as strong as he had ever been. Harpies did not weaken, not if they did not wish it. He wondered sometimes why he would not just let himself die as all the others had. It would have been easier and quite possibly the only way he would escape; it had already been three millennia and he had yet to leave the little corner in what had once been a stronghold and was now a zoo. It was amazing enough that humans, ever changing as they were, still used the structure. It had been left alone for years on end and someone always came back. He wondered if that was part of the curse that had been placed on him, that he could not suffer in solitude.
Now, as he watched the children walk past, jabbering to their mothers or their maids in a tongue that was far harsher than the one he had once heard humans saying, he kept his eyes open but let his mind drift away to the dreams of the sky, to where his wings could spread and away from this cage where they folded around him, cramped and uncomfortable. In his mind, he was not a trapped creature set out for children to admire but a general, proud and strong, leading his army into glorious battle. In his mind, he did not lose.